Messy Elections: Can we trust the results?The U.S. Can Be the Greatest Democracy on Earth, but Right Now it is Far From It

By Kevin ZeesePublished October 27th 2008 in TrueVote.US

For a country that considers itself the "greatest democracy on Earth," the U.S. sure does run messy elections.

This year about one-third the public is voting early, as a result we
are seeing election meltdowns in slow motion. Here is a sample of what
is occurring:- Long lines. In many states people are waiting hours,
some report as long as six hours to vote in early voting. A lot of the
delay has been due to the move to touchscreen voting machines and
electronic voter registration lists. These new technologies are slower
than paper.

- Machine breakdowns. In West Virginia six counties have reported
touchscreen machines switching their vote. Voters attempted to vote for
Obama and they saw the screen switch to McCain. There have been similar
reports in Tennessee and Texas. In Texas, where people are allowed to
select a straight party vote, the switching is occurring from Democrat
to Republican. A CNN poll found that 42% of Americans do not trust
their votes will be counted accurately.

- More machine breakdowns. It is not just touchscreen machines showing
problems, so are optical scan machines. In Florida there were reports
that the optical scan could not read the ballots because they were too
long.

- Failure to mail absentee ballots. Sequoia Voting Systems failed to
send 11,000 absentee ballots to voters who requested them. Sequoia also
did not tell the election administration of the oversight.

- Incomplete ballots. Early voters in two Arkansas counties received
incomplete ballots. The election administrator is not going to do
anything to correct the problem for those voters and just hopes the
election is not close so the votes would not have changed the outcome.

- Voter deception. In Florida Democratic voters received calls falsely
telling them they could call in their vote and avoid lines. In
Philadelphia, fliers warn that people with outstanding tickets, child
support payments and warrants will be arrested when they vote. In
Texas, people are told if they want to vote for all the Democrats and
make sure they vote for Obama, that after they select Democrat they
should then select Obama – in fact, that erases the Obama vote.

- Registration fraud. ACORN has gotten a lot of attention for workers
who registered the Dallas football team to vote in Utah, Mickey Mouse,
telephone-book registration and one person registering dozens of times.
It is hard to see how any of these false registrations will result in
false votes - will Mickey Mouse actually vote? But there has been a lot
of attention on this one.

- More registration fraud. A leader of a Republican registration drive,
funded by the McCain campaign has been arrested on massive voter fraud.

- Challenges to registration. Republicans have mounted challenges to
the tidal wave of Democratic registrations trying to force election
administrators to check the identification of all new registrants. In
state-after-state these challenges have been rejected by the courts.

- Voter suppression. Republican party officials in some states have
openly talked about challenging voters at the polls. New registrants
will be challenged and demanded to prove their identity. Registered
voters who have lost their home to foreclosure or been evicted from
their apartment are being threatened with voter challenges. Even if
these challenges fail they will slow voting down so that some voters
give up and go home.

Is any of this acceptable? The U.S. has a lot of serious problems with
its democracy when the very basics – registration, voting and vote
counting - is filled with flaws. While this election is looking more
and more like a likely landslide, after it is over these problems need
to be addressed. There are solutions to many of them:

- End registration problems. Universal voter registration for all
citizens of legal age would solve many of the problems associated with
registration and challenges to registration. If necessary, the Congress
could require county boards of election to provide a free voter ID card
with a photograph preventing the need for registration drives,
challenges to registration and challenges to voters at the polls.

- No more machine voting. A majority of the House voted fro Rep. Rush
Holt's bill to fund paper ballot based voting with audits but it needed
a super majority and was not voted on in the senate. The U.S. is close
to ending the experiment with touchscreen voting. Elections need to
have an independent paper record with the paper ballot verified by the
voter. If optical scan machines are used to count the vote there must
be a transparent, mandatory audit before the vote becomes official.

- End partisan election administration. Too often the election
administrator is a partisan who also serves as the chair of a political
campaign. Election administration needs to be divorced from
partisanship, turned into a professional civil service and provide
strong protection for election fraud whistle blowers. Every phase of
election administration should be transparent and open to the public.
This would also be an opportunity to end the administration of
elections by corporations that provide election equipment.

- Prosecute vote fraud. Illegal voting as well as suppression of the
vote need to be treated as serious crimes. People who falsely vote and
are not of legal age and citizenship should be prosecuted. Similarly,
threats of arrest and provision of false information needs to be turned
into a serious felony. Funds need to be provided to investigate and
prosecute these offenses.

- Make voting easy. Continue to expand early voting so voters can vote
at their convenience. Turn Election Day into a national holiday. The
U.S. should celebrate democracy and make voting as easy as possible.

The basics - registering, voting and vote counting - are only the tip
of the iceberg of election problems. Marylanders are the victims of the
Electoral College. We already know our electoral votes are going to
Obama because Maryland is a one-party state. This is true for forty
states. Voters in these states are learning their presidential vote has
little impact.

Partisan drawing of election districts makes removal of incumbents
almost impossible. Rather than voters picking their candidates, elected
officials pick their voters thereby assuring the result they want.
Drawing of districts should be turned over to a non-partisan civil
service and approved by the courts.

Closed debates have limited the choice of Americans to two parties even
though there are six candidates on enough ballots to win the Electoral
College vote. The fraudulent National Commission on Presidential
Debates, run by the two parties and designed to keep other candidates
out, should not be the arbiter of who participates in debates. Voters
lost a major opportunity in this time of economic turmoil to hear a
broader array of views on how to remake the American economy. The two
party’s present two candidates funded by Wall Street and other big
business interests. Their solutions do not challenge those who profit
from the status quo economy.

Nearly half of the voters voting for Obama and McCain are voting for
the lesser evil. They are trapped by a voting system limited to two
choices. It is time for the U.S. to implement ranked choice voting that
allows voters to rank their candidates and thereby vote their hopes and
dreams and not their fears.

The U.S. can have the greatest democracy in the world, but we are far
from it. After the election is time for people to get organized and
demand it. On so many issues the U.S. strives to be a “more perfect
union,” it has now become more evident that we need to strive to
achieve our goal of a real representative democracy.

You can take action now to protect the 2008 election by visiting www.TrueVote.US and visiting our take action page.
Details about all of the incidents described above are included in the
TrueVote.US site which is updated throughout the each day.